LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT ALICIA MCKAY
Why business training needs to change Alicia McKay shares her opinions on why traditional business education needs a revamp and what needs to take its place.
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n December 2020, Elon Musk made waves at the Wall Street Journal CEO summit. Decrying the ‘MBA-isation’ of executives, Elon argued that today’s top leaders spend too much time in front of spreadsheets and in meetings and not enough time thinking creatively and making things happen. Musk’s comments echo a growing scepticism with traditional business education. Studying management finance in the weekend no longer makes sense in a fast-moving global environment. In fact, very little does. The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a large-scale re-evaluation of the assumptions underpinning our careers and organisations. Some businesses floundered, while others flourished, casting a light on a leadership deficit that has been gaining pace for years: the loss of the strategic leader. Our strategic capacity is the single most important determinant of personal and organisational success. We’re quick to criticise in 28
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hindsight – why didn’t Kodak see the digital camera coming? How could Blockbuster underestimate Netflix? – yet we continue to invest in skills that hold us back, neglecting the things that make a real difference.
If you need to understand how best to adapt to your environment, how to make quality decisions…, how to drive focus … take people along on the journey… well, that one’s on you. MBA courses might be useful to optimise a supply chain or interpret a profit and loss statement, but those skills don’t cut it when our business model becomes irrelevant overnight. Unless we equip our leaders with strategic skills, our education loses relevance as the world continues to shift. Not all MBA programmes are created equally, of course. Many have seen the snow melting at the edges and started adapting their content accordingly. But, bound by the bureaucracy and limitations of the tertiary education sector, the format of these programmes remains astonishingly unchanged.
Most universities are large, unwieldy beasts, and change doesn’t happen quickly. All that bureaucracy comes at a cost, too, which the student foots. The average MBA student forks out close to $50,000 by the time they’ve finished their qualification, without taking into account costs of travel, opportunity cost at work and home, and the toll on their mental and physical health.
Five problems with traditional business education Problem 1: Lecture and listen
The first culprit is a reliance on the ‘lecture and listen’ form of learning. Students yawn through lengthy PowerPoint presentations and memorise complex jargon and theory, with little application to their real lives. Problem 2: Burnout Not only that, their real lives suffer. Most MBA students work full-time in jobs or businesses and juggle family and community responsibilities. Despite this, universities ask them to sacrifice upwards of 20 hours each week to complete their degree. Stress, illness and burnout are common, and the self-professed ‘career shortcut’ starts to feel a lot less short by year two.
